Lion of Ireland (24 page)

Six months. A half year of magic for Deirdre, when love was hers and the love songs sung in the hall were about her, her and Brian of the coppery hair. A half year in which she was to be tenderly courted with the reverence and respect due a noblewoman; when kisses would be chaste and sweet and the conventions limited the amount of liberties a suitor might take with a maiden—unless she encouraged him.

Six months in which to encapsulate all her happiness, before the reckoning came. Before the price must be paid.

Half a year. Days which Brian must fill with organizing and drilling the army, recruiting southern tribesmen and convincing them of the necessity for changing policy toward the Northmen. Days of accustoming himself to being the king’s brother, inhabitant of the royal residence and possessor of enough power to begin the reclamation of Munster for the Irish.

Six months in which to be tormented, not by a generalized longing for a female, but by a specific beauty.

Each day seemed endless. He selected presents for her, ordered feasts and games in her honor, and learned to play the harp with consummate skill, so that he might sing to her himself. And he tried very hard not to look at the cleft between her breasts when she bent over in a low-necked gown, or watch the sway of her hips when she walked away from him.

The first time he put his arms around her to claim a lover’s kiss she shuddered away from him, and at once he was reduced to a red-faced, stammering lout, apologizing for his clumsiness.

“It’s not your fault, please don’t take it that way!” Deirdre hastened to say. “It’s only ... I am not used to men. I beg you to be gentle with me, and patient.”

How lovely she was, how delicate and pure, like a I

donna. He should have understood! He took her into his arms again, using all his strength to be gentle, and let his lips touch hers so lightly he could hardly feel it.

And was bitterly ashamed at the way the heat welled up his loins, the way he wanted to crush her body against his and probe that soft mouth with his tongue.

The Thor’s Day market teemed with life. It had been set up just beyond the village at the crossroads, so that the main way to the Rock led through its center, and this road was lined with stalls and pens of livestock and small shops under tented roofs.

Gaudy bolts of fabric had been unrolled and spread in the sun to lure the eye with their crimson and blue and saffron. Craftsmen proudly displayed their metalwork on benches; the bronze worker and the tinsmith flaunted their wares, brass and copper gleamed, and there were trays of bronze bridle bits and elaborate decorations for horse harness.

Piles of vegetables nestled between baskets of herbs and medicinal bark, their fragrances vying with each other, only to be overcome by the fine dust of the road and the heavy aroma of manure drifting from the sheep pens and the horse paddock.

Voices young and old, cracked and sweet, sang their siren songs, inviting the onlooker to buy and denouncing the nonpurchaser as a scoundrel bound for the hangman.

Market day, and the people of Munster had come to buy and sell.

A master goldsmith, an ollamh, had set up a small display of his finest creations at a little distance from the main bustle of commercial activity. In accordance with the custom, Mahon would be establishing an ollamh of each of the professions at court, their stipend decreed by Brehon Law, and this ambitious fellow was determined to bring himself to the king’s attention.

Seeing him there, beautifully garbed and set apart from the other merchants by the status of his class and profession, Brian smiled to himself. This is the kind of mind I like, he thought; that man is going after fortune instead of waiting for it to come to him. I must remember to commend him to my brother.

Brian’s particular purpose in attending the market this day was to examine the horses; Mahon’s purchasing agents seemed incapable of understanding Brian’s requirements. The animals they brought for his inspection were invariably spavined, or had the rot-foot disease, or possessed the lumpish heads and porcine eyes of the truly intractable. The paddock where the horses were displayed was the hub of the market, as Tara was the hub of the Five Roads, and Brian spiraled his way inward toward it.

Removed from the nobility on the Rock by terrain and by the many and complex divisions of class within their society, the villagers and countryfolk were a rowdy lot, full of the ‘surge of life. Unattached women circulated freely, flashing bold eyes and making saucy conversation. Their carefree exuberance began to communicate itself to him. He was dressed as any common soldier, in a simple linen tunic with a sword at his hip; only his towering height and the perfection of his features identified him. When a pretty blond girl in a dress of rust-colored cloth winked at him, he winked back at her.

At that moment a large tabby cat wove its way between

two of the stalls and directly into his path, so that he almost stumbled over it before he became aware of the creature. He drew back his foot quickly to avoid kicking the animal, and the cat rewarded him with a loud purring, looking up into his face and rubbing trustingly against his ankles. Brian smiled and reached down to extend his fingers toward the cat in a ?

gesture of friendship, but it retreated just beyond his touch.

He took a step or two after it, only to have it disappear into the crowd.

He straightened up, feeling slightly foolish, and found himself in front of the herbalist’s stall, looking directly into the smiling eyes of a nut-brown maid who wore his silver brooch on her shoulder.

“Fiona?” he asked in astonishment.

His voice had grown so deep! she thought. But he was a man now; a decade had passed since they parted, and little was left of the boy she remembered. Only the eyes, and a certain air about him, a compelling quality like the magic stones that drew and held bits of iron.

“My lord,” she replied, dropping her gaze and bowing low. Beneath the counter her fingers were linked in one of the ancient signs of power, the Figure of the Net, and she felt him drawn to her and held there, transfixed.

“It is really you, isn’t it?” he asked wonderingly. “After all this time—it never occurred to me I’d find you here.”

“I wasn’t aware you were looking for me,” she said. Her eyes had never been innocent; now they seemed to be of a measureless depth, sparkling with amusement, warmly brown, and dear to him as rediscovered treasures always are.

And it was so easy to talk to her! Like resuming a conversation that had been broken off a few minutes before; none of the hesitations, the uncertainties. I don’t remember feeling so comfortable with her all those years ago, he thought. Perhaps I have learned something about women after all.

They sat together on the edge of a watering tough and shared a lunch of bread and cheese. Fiona swung her bare feet and laughed easily as she answered his questions. “Oh, I’ve been a widow for several years,” she told him. “When my grandfather finally died I couldn’t bear to live in our woods alone, so I went to Cahir and found myself a husband. An herbalist, he was; a nice fellow, older than me. We had something in common, knowing about potions and medicaments, and he had no objection to marrying a forest girl. He could not sire a child anyway, though he never stopped trying.”

It bothered Brian to think of her in another man’s bed. “What happened to him?”

”Ah, well, he heard of a new concoction of deer’s foot and ferns, supposed to cure bone-ache, so he made a tea of it and tried out his brew on the cartwright, who suffered terribly with that disease. And it did seem to help him.

“But the cartwright’s wife thought if a cup was good for him, a whole pot of it drunk at once should cure him entirely. She gave it to him, and he died, and his son got very upset and came after my poor husband.

They had a fearful fight. The lad lost his temper altogether and hit my husband in the head with a crock and killed him.”

“Good God!” Brian put an arm around her, eager to offer sympathy, but she drew back and looked at him with twinkling eyes. There was nothing of the bereaved widow about her, and she appeared to be in no need of sympathy. In fact, she laughed.

“Don’t be thinking it was such a tragedy! I had not been long wed, just enough to give me respectability, but it was long enough for me to find out that matrimony is not to my liking. And as I said, he was older.

“The whole thing came up before the court of the Brehon, and the judges heard my side and the other widow’s side. Our husbands were equal in class so the erics for their deaths canceled each other out, but the ruling was that my husband could not be blamed for the misuse of one of his medicaments, whereas the other woman’s son could be blamed for injudicious application of the crock. I was awarded two new carts and half a cow, so I took my husband’s stock and came up here to start business for myself.” “But why Cashel?”

“Oh, I had . . . some responsibilities here, things that needed looking after.” She waved a hand airily, then smiled at him. “Besides, I always knew you would come here.” She lowered her chin and looked up at him through her lashes. She sat very close to him, her body smelling like ripe fruit in the warm sun.

“Can you tell the future, Fiona?” he asked. How alive she was! How easy and earthy and full of female richness! How

splendid to be with a woman without feeling cautious and restrained.

“Aye, some,” she answered carefully.

“Can you tell mine?”

“I could if I had a mind to.”

“Then do it!”

She shifted her weight and let herself lean against him, her thigh pressing his. Her hand dropped onto his leg and lay there quietly a moment, then moved slowly upward, nearer the groin. It was a very conscious gesture. Brian looked down and watched it, that small brown hand, its fingernails broken and bare, moving with sensual assurance toward the suddenly inflamed center of his being where all his own consciousness was concentrated.

“That’s easy,” she told him. “You’re going to come home with me.”

They lay entangled in the sweat-soaked bed and Brian listened to the gradually subsiding thunder of his heart.

“Brian?” Fiona was burrowed into his armpit, her right arm across his broad chest, her right leg overlapping his loins. He could feel the silky heat of her inner thigh against his newly flaccid penis.

“Brian?”—

“Hmmm?”

“Has it been a long time, for you?”

It took an effort to force his voice upward from some faraway place in his chest. “Long enough. I might ask you the same thing.”

She chuckled, a small, cozy sound. “Wife is better than maiden, and widow is better than wife.”

“What does that mean?”

She chuckled again, like a little stream gurgling happily over smooth round stones. “It means I was too long a wild thing, I suppose. I like the bed part, but I don’t like being any man’s possession.”

For the first time in hours he thought of Deirdre, with an exquisite stab of guilt for having forgotten her for so long. He tried to push her into some other compartment of his brain, far removed from this place and time; he felt that he must separate the two worlds and fiercely guard the barrier between them.

Fiona felt some part of him withdraw from her; not his easily captured body, but his soul. She began moving her hand on his chest in small, delicate circles. Spirals. Around the nipple, then across it with a caress light as a moth’s wing, then circling again. The nipple stiffened as her own were doing. She leaned over and replaced her fingers with her tongue, and he shuddered violently and forgot Deirdre’s violet eyes. “How flat your belly is,” she murmured. Her tongue painted visions of delight on his flesh.

Brian groaned as she moved lower, setting fire to him with her mouth. “Who taught you that?”

The laughter was in her voice again. “No one had to teach me—I was born knowing. It is the Earth Mother’s tribute to the Seedbearer.” Her hands caressed his thighs, stroking, rousing as he had never been roused by a woman. Fiona’s body-knowledge of him seemed total; wherever he ached for her she kissed him, wherever there was longing to be touched she touched him. She brought him to a fresh peak of desire so intense it seemed impossible that he had already taken her a short time before.

“The first one was just to ease the pressure a little,” she whispered against his flesh, her hands moving, her hips suggesting the new rhythm. “This one will be for joy.”

Later, she bathed him with water and a fragrant oil that had a sharp underscent to it, leaving his skin tingling. He lay on the bed, tranquil at last, watching her as she bustled efficiently about the hearth, preparing a meal.

Fiona’s little cottage wrapped its arms around them, exhaling its sweet breath of fresh mud-plaster and peat smoke, and the new thatch on the roof. The simple bed was not a finely carved wooden box, or a neatly planked compartment set against the wall, but merely a pile of furs and blankets in one corner, close enough to the only window so that Fiona could lie at night and watch the stars. Just inside the door of the cottage a shallow depression in the packed earthen floor marked the space hollowed out by her hens, when the rain drove them to take their daily dust-baths indoors. The walls were lined with shelves, and every shelf was crammed with the pots and jars of the herbalist’s trade.

Without turning his head from where he lay, Brian could see the two pegs where her clothes were hung, and, on the floor, the brown crumple of the shift he had mindlessly ripped from her body. She kicked it aside with her foot when she found it in her way, telling him with that simple gesture how little such things meant to her. Her skin, naked and glowing in the firelight, was milky white except for her tanned face and throat, her slender arms and hands, her bare feet and lean ankles.

Brian lay in Fiona’s bed, letting his eyes follow her, smelling the soup bubbling in the cauldron as she dropped in heated stones to speed its cooking, and discovered the word peace had some meaning to him after all.

Peace is fragile. It shattered as they finished their meal and he mopped up the last drops with his bread.